The ideal reader of “Sexo de cine” (ICAIC Publishing House, 2012), by Alberto Garrandés, is the guy who goes to the movies to jerk off: the “Vagina Destroyer”. But this does not mean that this volume is not literally the most lively and sweaty autopsy made by a Cuban to contemporary cinema. Whether to address sadomasochism of an unsettling Conservatory teacher, specialist in Schubert, who makes cuts with razor blades in her pubis (you must see: The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke); or the understanding of Rocco Siffredi: ” To get into the ass of a woman you must first enter her brain” (Anatomy of Hell by Catherine Breillat); or the moral immunodeficiency of Larry Clark’s films; or the explicit paraphilias of Antichrist, which, at the pace of Handel, made only Lars von Trier truly happy.
Thus, the book is a sort of Contemporary Sexual Mediatheque with a single hero always erect: the viewer. And for him, Garrandés takes the assay to a new level of intimacy: he escorts us beyond the room and gets us into the movies. Because there is no more fertile ground for the planting and harvesting sperm than the Chaplin or Payret cinemas.
Alberto Garrandés, to badly define him, is a “pornópata” but we’ll talk about that later. Let us just say that Garrandés is what he is because one day he began to devour pornography and did not ever stop. That is his endorphin: being exposed to the beneficial radiation of Abella Anderson. Pornotherapy rather than chemotherapy. (The contributions of the Cuban University of Information Sciences (UCI by its Spanish acronym) in the field of pharmaco pornography are widely known). Yes, despite their origins and theoretical training, a group of UCI scientists showed -in “practice” – that video-penetration is so stimulating to the suboccipital lobe and its surroundings as working with Linux). Therefore, his first reaction is to write a book about the “sex made for cinema.” The same path through which Roberto Bolaño had traveled, eleven years before, with “Prefiguración de Lalo Cura”: curious mixture of fiction and XXX movie synopsis to tell the story of Olimpo Cinematographic Production, I mean, the history of Latin American porno.
But “Sexo de cine” is not that. And when I say “it is not that,” I mean exactly that: it is not a book with the pollen of pornography, although it pokes its head with Ecstasy in Berlin 1926: a soft-core intending to be a porno of the 1920s. Eroticism is within him as preseminal prose. Yes, Garrandés cannot sleep and instead of counting sheep, comments on movie scenes that are now part of the side effects of cinephilia: the one of a youngster writing -in The Pillow Book- a Lord’s Prayer on Nagiko´s belly and breasts and then licks them; the puppy and the girl naked in Molina`s Ferozz; that of the bar of butter in Last Tango in Paris; Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in Persona; and the gynecological stripteases in The Exterminating Angels imitated by many girls in privacy. These are all hot and fast-access-to-the-brain scenes that Garrandés comments guided by the autopilot of sex.
Three things caught my attention from the book:
First: The powerful magnetism exerted by sexuality when bursting in such a closed world like Cuban publishing ecosystem, where most of the books play the same: to castrate us.
Second: What Garrandés does to the brain of the reader. Strangely, so far our film critics have been used by the viewer as decoys: they serve to escape from what they extol and perhaps turn to what they revile. Random example : while a presbyter of the Cuban audiovisual fiercely recommends “El viajero inmóvil, “ by Tomas Piard, the audience in the cinema has to face floods, droughts, sudden crystallization and a river that comes from nowhere and drags the brave and soaked people outside the enclosure. However, the Garrandés greatest hits of sex have conquered the viewer. (Of course, the publication of “Sexo de cine” has helped to raise the level of effectiveness of average masturbator). I can imagine all those last-show moviegoers, distinctive “Ultimate Sex Machine” aspect-at Payret cinema- when showing Wild at Heart, by David Lynch. I imagine those guys in the skin of Nicolas Cage when Laura Dern goes up to her room, gets undressed and very open (the viewer sees nothing because nothing is shown) says: “Give a bite to the peach.” It is easy to imagine them happy because a movie is showing some film by Patrice Chéreau. “This one is very good,” masturbator A says to masturbator B, “look what Garrandés notes” and opens the page of “Sexo de cine” dedicated to Intimacy:
The simple and dense matter of intimacy is the sexual, somatic, skin-to-skin -articulation of a man (Jay) and a woman (Claire) who meet on Wednesdays to have sex.
And then together, A and B, enter the Payret to check how many Wednesdays are there in an hour and a half of French cinema.
Third: The chronic lack of Cuban films, with the exception of Molina´s bright flashes, Tomas Piard´s excesses, and some other painfully wrested from our film industry.
But beyond these concerns, “Sexo de cine” also offers something else because it can also be read as Alberto Garrandés´ another autobiography. His history as a spectator is an alternative, but too obvious. For example, you may discover that Garrandés hardly likes movies, they rather interest him. Probably this has to do with his character of leader of professional criticism, and the four or five basic problems that he tends to seek-and finds, in all the objects that he sees: eroticism, writing, sex and language, pornography, transgression, etc. So the movies that interest him are those that somehow connect with these problems. And I guess that is the reason for which that appears in his book “El viajero inmóvil”. There are only five minutes, the sequence where Cemí contemplates couples caressing each other behind the main altar of the Cathedral of Havana, that resound on Garrandés because discover an Xs problem, and make that this awful movie (with the most unexpected cameos in the history of Cuban cinema) to appear in the book.
Then the name on the cover -floating on a Pepe Menendez bar of butter is the one of Alberto Garrandés. But it could be that of Sade (“Sexo de cine” is the closest thing to “The 120 Days of Sodom”, published in Cuba. An effort to imagine and to show, with statistical accuracy, the total sum of all sex forms of pleasure-and pain- to which the human body can undergo in film industry. It is a best seller in the genre of essay, without Sade, but with David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Catherine Breillat).
Or the one of Damien Hirst (I have in mind the piece “Deseando una total y absoluta supresión del dolor”: a transparent cubicle with four televisions blaring, issuing without stopping advertisements for analgesics: aspirin, Tylenol, Nurofen, etc). Because when you open “Sexo de cine”, its pages also begin to emit mega-erotic things and scenes to which the viewer is happily addicted, and then he enters the film and -into Garrandés effect, within seconds of being there, darkness is so fruitful.
